The writing was on the wall there for a while, and then being stripped of all athletic teams probably hastened the demise.
It sounds like they will likely have to close soon since the article says they won’t continue to fight the expiration of their accreditation (which ends this semester.)
The problem with looking primarily at endowment per student is that colleges that are struggling financially have very few students.
Earlham has 677 students and around $420 million as an endowment, while U. of Health Sciences & Pharmacy in St. Louis was down to 361 undergraduates with an endowment of $110 million. At the same time Wesleyan, which has 2,050 students, has 1.64 Billion as an endowment.
With All the closings in Massachusetts Lesley University worried about their jobs as they are concerned the Lesley might be forced to merge. Enrollments there have declines big time and they are running out of buildings to sell to stay afloat.
A unionized faculty demanding job protection if a merger occurs. That will make Lesley very appealing to potential acquiring institutions! 
can’t find a newer one - but their base salaries are worse than local public school teachers, so there is that… not exactly wildly compensated…I know entry-level people who make more than their base associate/assist profs even adjusted for year-round schedules I think (though didn’t do all the math) (and COL are tiny since 2019-2020) I mean I know profs don’t necessarily get paid a lot - but Cambridge / Boston is VERY high COL and a full prof at 80K (9 month even) is very little even in 2020. That is like Project Manager at Harvard.
I
https://www.cpsd.us/administration/human-resources/information-for-job-seekers/rewards-and-benefits
Lesley faculty on strike.
Faculty at Lesley University goes on strike
If the enrolment and tuition money are not there, where is the funding supposed to come from? It appears that the “Lesley model” in no longer viable and hasn’t been for some time.
Oh, I simply meant that someone taking them over won’t necessarily freak out by their specific costs… most people seem to think union –> high costs..… and even grad students are unionized in metro Boston (though not faculty usually)..
The whole school may not be possible as a going concern, but the ed /counseling departments may be (which is what most people go there for)
Or maybe Matt Damon will save them - isn’t that where his mom taught? 
- don’t think he is THAT rich though.
Last, last ditch effort for Hampshire:
They would be concerned about the guaranteed job security in case of a merger.
Unions don’t mean high costs. They exist to try to help their members receive fair treatment. I was a member of a union as a financial aid officer. In 2008, I made less than I had made as a (non-union) production supervisor in 1986. I am perplexed as to why people equate wanting protection in their low-paying jobs to being greedy.
Exactly. And being a member of a union does NOT protect you from being laid off. It can help make sure that a legal process is being followed during a layoff (as in- you can’t first lay off all the women who are pregnant, and then lay off everyone over 60 in an effort to save money on the organization’s health insurance). And it can help protect someone who is being laid off (allegedly for cause) when that cause is being a “whistle-blower”. People who are union members get terminated every day. The union can’t always prevent the layoffs, but they add an extra layer of protection to clearly retaliatory or illegal terminations.
But the article says that Lesley faculty want guarantees that if the university is acquired by another institution, they would retain their jobs.
The union is bargaining. In America, unlike in some other countries, the expectation is that union and management will take opposite positions & work toward a middle ground. At least, that’s the history of unions in America.
You seem to be under the impression that if Lesley faculty were not unionized, that they would all be cool with being laid off in the event of a merger.
I am not certain how that follows.
No. But an onerous union contract, especially involving guaranteed employment, would be a poison pill that would lessen the likelihood of a merger candidate emerging.
Wheezing on the coals?
People sometime seem to think that a college is like a corporation. The Executives are all that are important, while everybody else is a worker who can be replaced.
At a college, presidents come and go, provosts come and go, Deans come and go. None of them hold their positions for more than a few years. The people who are there for decades, the people who make up the REAL part of the college, the people who do the job for which a college exists, are the FACULTY.
Any agreement that ignores the faculty sets a college on the path to losing it’s mission.
Yes, there are colleges which have taken this corporate business model, which is why we have issues like grade super-inflation and disappearing academic standards. That’s the real reason that faculty have become disengaged, why they are losing contact with what’s going on. Faculty are being told to keep the students happy and keep enrollment up, rather than try and educate the students.
Worse, at the same time the administration increases the demand that faculty bring in research money and increase the college’s ranking by publishing. So faculty are told not to care about students other than as a source of income for the college.
Getting rid of unions so that a college can “sell” better is tantamount to saying that the college is nothing more than a for-profit business, whose purpose is students satisfaction, not student education. Faculty are employees who work at the pleasure of the administration, while the entire job of the administration is to make sure that the business is profitable.
Furthermore, getting rid of faculty unions reduces the ability of the college to hire the best faculty. Of course, if Faculty are nothing more than easily replaceable employees whose primary job is to generate profit for the college, then hiring the faculty who are the best teachers and who produce the highest quality research is no longer a goal. The goal is to find the cheapest faculty who can provide the highest satisfaction for the paying costumers at the lowest price.
Bottom line, it’s better to close a college, rather than keep it open, if the price of keeping it open is to make it easier to fire faculty for no real cause.
Well, that is the obvious take…
As a practical matter, there is no way to really have that guaranteed, is there, even with a union? - teachers get laid off all the time (even in MA) with strong unions, and certainly aren’t replaced when there is attrition, etc, etc. They are using the union to try to get a better position when the university (likely) merges with others… which is the entire purpose of a union. They have barely had a raise in years and years and years FAR less than COL, I don’t blame them in the slightest.
And yes, it could harm potential negotiations somewhat, I guess, but I highly doubt they will break them for several reasons that I don’t feel like writing 4 paragraphs about right now 
You can think this is some sort of huge hindrance! Time will tell.
I am not sure what this means?